On Thursday night we’ll get treated to some of the finest political oratory this land has to offer when John Kerry, tall and tan, dull and drab, squares off for the first time against George W. Bush, whose license to use the English language should have been revoked years ago.

There’s almost no hope of seeing someone actually land a knockout punch, since modern televised political debate has been reduced to a flurry of weak jabs and scripted talking points. But we’ll all still tune in anyway to watch them duke it out, if only because whatever else we might have wanted to watch got pre-empted.